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them.
    It’s not clear exactly when or how, but ultimately Cameron and Janice reached an understanding. It was a trade-off. He could kidnap someone if she could have someone as well. She wanted a baby.
    By now they’d found a more suitable address: 1140 Oak Street. It was a small two-bedroom house with yards front and back, hardwood floors, a nice dining room, and a basement.
    The basement was tiny, but it would do. With boards from the Diamond lumberyard, Cameron constructed a wide table — a platform, really — that he dubbed the rack. He affixed eyehooks at each corner so the leather cuffs he’d made could be easily attached when he wanted to stake out Janice. He put additional hooks in a beam in the ceiling, for hanging. And then he built the head box.
    It was an ingenious contraption, built strong and heavy surprisingly heavy, with those big metal hinges and its dual walls.
    He had Janice come down to test it, and sure enough, the neck hole was the right size and it closed just as it should.
    But not everything went according to plan. Though Cameron’s preparations were ample and his plans well thought out, finding the right person wasn’t so easy. Janice got pregnant and had her baby, a girl, in the fall of 1976, but Cameron still hadn’t managed to accomplish his end of the deal. He had all the equipment ready in the car, had even stalked a few women, snapping photos with his telephoto lens, but none of them had panned out. Though he’d come within a fraction of realizing his single, driving ambition, something always went wrong.
    But on May 19, 1977, Cameron Hooker’s luck changed.
    At the end of his shift at Diamond, he came home from work as usual at about four o’clock. He picked up his wife and baby, and they went for a drive. They drove around for half an hour or so, and then he saw her.
    Standing at the side of Antelope Boulevard, Colleen Stan wouldn’t have struck most people as distinctive. She was an average size and wore the casual attire of young people everywhere. Looking closely, one might notice her soft features and crystalline blue eyes, but from the perspective of a speeding car, she was just a young female hitchhiker.
    He stopped and offered her a ride. Colleen surveyed the man, his wife, and their infant daughter, and decided they seemed innocuous enough.
    The next morning Cameron Hooker came downstairs and took Colleen out of the box. He walked his exhausted captive across the basement and laid her down on the rack. He now locked the chains that were still around her wrists to the hooks at the rack’s top corners and tied her ankles to the ones at the bottom. Then he left her there, with the head box still on, for the rest of the day.
    That evening, Janice and Cameron finally brought down Colleen’s first meal. Cameron let her up from the rack and removed the head box, but the blindfold stayed on. Her dinner was a bowl of potatoes au gratin and a glass of water. Sitting on the edge of the rack, she was allowed to feed herself, the chains dangling from her wrists as she blindly scooped up the food.
    After she’d finished her meal, Colleen was permitted to use a bedpan, which Cameron later emptied upstairs. Then the chains on her wrists were replaced with the leather cuffs, and Cameron hung her for a while. Later, he put the head box back on, chained her down on the rack, and left her to the darkness…
    Colleen remembers her second meal very well. It was a hot day, the heat exacerbated by the stuffy head box, and she had been lying on the rack, sweating. It had been another twenty-four hours since her last meal, and her captor apparently expected her to be hungry. He brought down a glass of water and a plate with two large egg sandwiches and let her up so she could eat.
    But heat and anxiety had taken her appetite away. She ate half of a sandwich, drank all the water, and told him she was full.
    “You should be grateful I brought this to you,” he scolded.
    He told her she was